Ronnie and Nancy

by Bob Colacello

  Mr. Stripling: You have no knowledge yourself as to whether or not any of them are members of the Communist Party?

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  Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House Mr. Reagan: No, sir, I have no investigative force, or anything, and I do not know.

  Mr. Stripling: Mr. Reagan, what is your feeling about what steps should be taken to rid the motion-picture industry of any Communist influences?

  Mr. Reagan: Well, sir, ninety-nine percent of us are pretty well aware of what is going on, and I think, within the bounds of our democratic rights and never once stepping over the rights given us by democracy, we have done a pretty good job in our business of keeping those people’s activities curtailed. After all, we must recognize them at present as a political party. On that basis we have exposed their lies when we came across them, we have opposed their propaganda, and I can certainly testify that in the case of the Screen Actors Guild we have been eminently successful in preventing them from, with their usual tactics, trying to run a majority of an organization with a well-organized minority. In opposing those people, the best thing to do is make democracy work. In the Screen Actors Guild we make it work by insuring everyone a vote and by keeping everyone informed. I believe that, as Thomas Jefferson put it, if all the American people know all of the facts they will never make a mistake. Whether the Party should be outlawed, that is a matter for the Government to decide. As a citizen, I would hesitate to see any political party outlawed on the basis of its political ideology. We have spent a hundred and seventy years in this country on the basis that democracy is strong enough to stand up and fight against the inroads of any ideology. However, if it is proven that an organization is an agent of a foreign power, or in any way not a legitimate political party—and I think the Government is capable of proving that—then that is another matter. I happen to be very proud of the industry in which I work; I happen to be very proud of the way in which we conducted the fight. I do not believe the Communists have ever at any time been able to use the motion-picture screen as a sounding board for their philosophy or ideology.

  When Reagan finished, Thomas spoke up, hoping to seize the high ground that the actor had claimed so gracefully with his short soliloquy on the nature of democracy. “There is one thing that you said that interests me very much,” Thomas said. “That was the quotation from Jefferson.

  That is just why this Committee was created by the House of Representatives: to acquaint the American people with the facts. Once the American Divorce: 1947–1948

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  people are acquainted with the facts there is no question but that the American people will do the kind of job that they want done: that is, to make America just as pure as we can possibly make it. We want to thank you very much for coming here today.”

  But Reagan was not about to let the New Jersey congressman hijack Jefferson for his own purposes. “Sir,” he rejoined, “if I might, in regard to that, say that what I was trying to express, and didn’t do very well, was also this other fear. I detest, I abhor their philosophy, but I detest more than that their tactics, which are those of the fifth column, and are dishonest.

  But at the same time I never as a citizen want to see our country become urged, by either fear or resentment of this group, that we ever compromise with any of our democratic principles through that fear or resentment. I still think that democracy can do it.”91

  Reagan’s performance impressed a wide range of observers, from Nixon on the right to ADA executive secretary James Loeb on the left. Loeb, whom Reagan met with before leaving Washington, thought his testimony was “by all odds, the most honest and forthright from a decent liberal point of view” and called him “the hero” of the hearings.92 The press was also adu-latory: The New York Times, The Washington Post, Life, and Motion Picture Daily singled him out for his credibility and refusal to name names. “Intelligent Ronald Reagan stole the show from his better known colleagues,”

  wrote Quentin Reynolds in Collier’s magazine. “Reagan, it was obvious, had done a good deal of thinking on the subject in question.”93 Even the recently installed Communist government of Rumania paid him the compliment of being the only star among the friendly witnesses whose movies were not banned by its Ministry of Information Censorship Division.94

  Eleven of the Unfriendly 19 were called to testify the following week.

  When asked the fateful question—“Are you now or have you ever been a member of the Communist Party?”—ten refused to give a direct answer, choosing instead to lecture the committee on the Bill of Rights, compare its members to Hitler, Goebbels, and Himmler, and otherwise make themselves look, in John Huston’s phrase, like “belligerent buffoons.”95 In doing so, the Hollywood 10, as they would be known from then on, played right into the hands of Parnell Thomas, who pounded his gavel and charged them with contempt of Congress.

  “I am not on trial here, Mr. Chairman. This Committee is on trial here before the American people. Let’s get that straight,” shouted John Howard Lawson in a typical outburst.96 After ordering police officers to remove the 2 1 8

  Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House screenwriter from the stand, Thomas had Stripling read a nine-page memorandum detailing Lawson’s long and extensive involvement with Communist activities in Hollywood.97 A second investigator produced a copy of Lawson’s 1944 Communist Party registration card. Dalton Trumbo wouldn’t even say whether or not he was a member of the Screen Writers Guild. Albert Maltz, Alvah Bessie, Samuel Ornitz, Herbert Biberman, Edward Dmytryk, Adrian Scott, Ring Lardner Jr., and Lester Cole gave equally truculent performances before the hearings were abruptly suspended by Thomas on October 30, some say because of the negative publicity, others because by then he had realized his goal of instilling the fear of God into the studio moguls. Only Bertolt Brecht, who as a resident alien felt his position was especially precarious, had outrightly—and probably falsely—denied Party membership and escaped a contempt citation.

  “It was a sorry performance,” wrote John Huston in his 1980 memoir, An Open Book. “You felt your skin crawl and your stomach turn. I disapproved of what was being done to the Ten, but I also disapproved of their response. They had lost a chance to defend a most important principle. . . .

  Before this spectacle, the attitude of the press had been extremely sympathetic. Now it changed.”98 Huston and two dozen other luminaries from the Committee for the First Amendment, including Humphrey Bogart, Lauren Bacall, Gene Kelly, and Danny Kaye, had flown to Washington the day before the unfriendly witnesses began testifying.99

  The First Amendment group also produced an anti-HUAC radio show, titled Hollywood Fights Back, which was broadcast nationwide on ABC the day they flew to Washington. The half-hour program featured brief remarks by four U.S. senators as well as a slew of film personalities, beginning with Myrna Loy announcing, “We question the right of Congress to ask any man what he thinks on political issues,” and ending with Judy Garland urging listeners to write their congressmen to protest the inquiry.100 But as Huston and his colleagues sat in the back-row seats that Thomas had assigned them, watching the men they were there to support sink to the chairman’s level, they felt increasingly let down and hopeless. President Truman decided not to have them to lunch after all, Life magazine mocked them as “lost liberals,” and the right-wing Hearst papers began a campaign to portray Huston as “the brains of the Communist Party in the West.”101 On his way back to Los Angeles, Bogart told a Chicago columnist that the Washington trip had been “ill-advised, even foolish,” and not long after that he called himself a

  “dope” in a Photoplay article titled “I’m No Communist.”102 Reagan, it Divorce: 1947–1948

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  seemed, had been wise to avoid the Committee for the First Amendment from the beginning. He would later write that “it was for suckers only.”103

  New York Governor Herbert Lehman, Broadway’s George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart, publishing executives Bennett Cerf and Clifton Fadiman,
and composer Leonard Bernstein lent their voices to a second Hollywood Fights Back broadcast in early November, all to no avail. The American Legion threatened to organize a boycott of movies on which the Hollywood 10

  worked, and a Gallup Poll showed that Americans favored punishing the uncooperative witnesses by a margin of 46 to 29 percent (though only 30

  percent approved of the way the investigation had been handled).104 On November 24, the House of Representatives voted overwhelmingly to uphold the contempt citations against the Hollywood 10.105

  The next day a conclave of film industry chieftains, including Mayer, Jack and Harry Warner, Joseph Schenck of 20th Century Fox, Barney Balaban of Paramount, and Harry Cohn of Columbia, met at the Waldorf-Astoria hotel in New York and unanimously agreed to dismiss the ten without compensation. “We do not desire to prejudge their legal rights,” the studio heads maintained in a press release that came to be known as the Waldorf Declaration, “but their actions have been a disservice to their employ-ers and have impaired their usefulness to the industry.”106

  The moguls didn’t stop with the Hollywood 10. Prodded by Eric Johnston, the president of the Motion Picture Producers Association, who had sworn at the hearings that the industry would never institute a blacklist, they now put the beginnings of one in place. “On the broader issue of alleged subversive and disloyal elements in Hollywood,” the producers’

  statement continued, “our members are likewise prepared to take positive action. We will not knowingly employ a Communist or a member of any party or group which advocates the overthrow of the government of the United States by force or by any illegal or unconstitutional methods.”107

  The New York Times called the producers’ decision “an action unprecedented in American industrial fields.”108 RKO fired Scott and Dmytryk the next day, Fox let Lardner go the day after that, and Trumbo and Cole were banished from MGM the following week; the other five were not under contract to a studio. All ten were subsequently indicted by a federal grand jury, tried, convicted of contempt, and, after the Supreme Court refused to take up their case in April 1950, imprisoned for up to one year.

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  Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House

  “Hollywood is going to clear up its back yard,” Mayer announced upon his return from New York.109 At two meetings, in late November and early December, Mayer and other top executives urged the leaders of the directors, writers, and actors guilds, including Reagan, to endorse the Waldorf Declaration, arguing that their harsh new policy was necessary to mollify public opinion and protect the industry from more government interference. “It was generally agreed that Louis B. Mayer, at the second of these sessions, hit on the most graphic way of expressing the official point of view,” screenwriter Gordon Kahn recalled sarcastically in his 1948 memoir, Hollywood on Trial. “The British people, he said, had their Royal Family, in veneration of which a certain deep human impulse was satisfied. American democracy had to have a similar object of worship, and it had found it in the personalities of the motion picture business. That was why any word or act from Hollywood which shook the loyalty of even a fraction of the royal subjects was a matter for grave alarm and a potential contribution to national disintegration.”110

  Reagan had been reelected SAG president in mid-November; in that same vote his fellow actors backed his policy of requiring Guild officers to sign loyalty oaths. Still, he had serious misgivings about denying anyone employment because of his or her political affiliation, as the producers were setting out to do. He made this clear in the pointed questions he asked Mayer and his cohorts at the December 3 meeting—Why had they suddenly reversed their policy? How could they prove someone was a Communist? What about members of Communist fronts who were not Communists themselves?111—and in a statement he prepared for the December 8 meeting of SAG’s board, in which he wrote, “We have no desire to protect communists. However, liberty cannot be held in water tight compartments. Once suppression, backed by the pressure of fear, breaks down one bulkhead, the other compartments are soon flooded.”112 Mayer responded by saying that he knew a Commie when he saw one, and the SAG board rejected Reagan’s proposed statement as not tough enough.113

  By December 19, when Reagan met with the FBI for the second time that month, he had apparently come around to the producers’ point of view: T-10 advised Special Agent [blacked out] that he has been made a member of a committee headed by L.B. MAYER, the purpose of which allegedly is to “purge” the motion picture industry of Communist Party members, which committee was an outgrowth of the Divorce: 1947–1948

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  THOMAS committee hearings in Washington and the subsequent meeting of motion picture producers in New York City.114

  Reagan was not the only would-be liberal floundering ideologically; nor was he alone in giving in to the rising tide of reaction. Shortly after the HUAC hearings, the Directors Guild followed SAG in adopting a loyalty oath, with only a furious John Huston and a hesitant Billy Wilder, among the 150 or 200 directors present, voting against it. Even William Wyler, who had founded the Committee for the First Amendment with Huston, raised his hand in support.115 Dore Schary, then vice president of RKO, and the prominent independent producer Walter Wanger, both longtime liberal activists, had reluctantly gone along with the Waldorf Declaration, had then helped Mayer sell it to the guilds, and now took an active role in setting up Mayer’s purge–cum–public relations committee, officially called the Motion Picture Industry Council (MPIC). Reagan represented SAG at the council’s first meeting in early 1948; six months later, he was made co-chairman of this increasingly powerful group, which brought together the leaders of the studios, the guilds, and the unions under a single anti-Communist banner.116

  “You bore me! Get out!” Those were the words with which Jane Wyman greeted Ronald Reagan upon his return home from the Washington hearings in late October 1947. Reagan was accustomed to his wife’s moodiness, but this was the first time she told him—in no uncertain terms—that she wanted a divorce.117 “Jane wasn’t interested in what Ronnie was interested in,” Nancy Reagan told me, “and she wasn’t about to try to become interested.”118

  “It just horrified him and shocked him,” said their old friend Leonora Hornblow. “He just didn’t think he’d ever be divorced. His mother had put up with an awful lot from the father, and they remained married.”119

  “I suppose there had been warning signs, if only I hadn’t been so busy,”

  Reagan later wrote, “but small-town boys grow up thinking only other people get divorced. The plain truth was that such a thing was so far from even being imagined by me that I had no resources to call upon.”120

  Ronnie’s first reaction was to talk Jane out of it. “We’ll lead an ideal life if you’ll avoid doing just one thing,” he told her. “Don’t think.”121 But it was just that dismissive attitude, all the more demeaning because it was so unconscious, that exasperated her. She had had it with his endless debates 2 2 2

  Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House over politics with their friends, his late nights at SAG meetings, his foreign policy lectures at the breakfast table when all she wanted to do was get ready for work. “I got along without you before,” she shouted at him outside the Beverly Club as they waited for their car, “and I certainly can get along without you now!”122 When California’s then lieutenant governor, Goodwin Knight, stopped by their table at Ciro’s one night and started talking politics, Wyman practically yawned in his face.123

  As soon as shooting on Johnny Belinda was finished in mid-November, she took off for “a long rest” in New York. On December 5, while Christmas shopping in Beverly Hills, Ronnie was stopped cold by a headline in the Los Angeles Examiner: jane wyman, mate in rift124 “There is no use in lying,” Jane was quoted as saying. “I am not the happiest girl in the world.

  It’s nothing that’s happened recently, it’s an accumulation of things that have been coming on for a long time. . . . We will talk things over a
nd I hope and believe that we will solve our problems and avoid a separation.”125 A Photoplay article titled “Those Fightin’ Reagans” soon followed, reporting that Wyman had confided to a friend in New York, “We’re through. We’re finished. And it’s all my fault.”126

  Louella Parsons was the first to reach Ronnie after the news broke.

  “Right now, Louella, Jane needs very much to have a fling and I intend to let her have it,” he told the columnist who had given them their wedding reception. “She is sick and nervous and not herself. . . . Jane says she loves me, but is no longer ‘in love’ with me, and points out that this is a fine distinction. That, I don’t believe. I think she is nervous, despondent, and because of this she feels our life together has become humdrum.”127 “I love Jane, and I know she loves me,” he insisted to Hedda Hopper. “I don’t know what this is all about, and I don’t know why Jane has done it. For my part, I hope to live with her for the rest of my life.”128 He reminded movie reporter Gladys Hall that Jane had lost a baby only six months earlier and almost immediately after had taken on “a taxing, difficult role” in Johnny Belinda. “Perhaps, too,” he added, “my seriousness about public affairs has bored Jane.”129

  On December 14, back in Los Angeles, Jane Wyman announced that she was separating from her husband. Reagan moved into the Garden of Allah. “If this comes to divorce, I think I’ll name Johnny Belinda as co-respondent,” he joked to Hedda Hopper, fueling the rumors that Lew Ayres was the real reason Wyman had left him, which Reagan then vehemently denied, insisting that no other man was involved.130

  Divorce: 1947–1948

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  Warner Bros. announced that Wyman would not co-star with Reagan in John Loves Mary, a Jerry Wald production scheduled to begin shooting in January. Wyman’s replacement, Patricia Neal, then a twenty-one-year-old ingénue, was introduced to Reagan at a party on New Year’s Eve. “He said, ‘Well, we’re going to do a film together.’ And I thought, Good, good, good,” the actress told me. “Then midnight came and we all went outside, and he wept and wept on an older woman’s arm. He was heartbroken. He really was.”131